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Architecture & Design

Mini-talks: The Machine Intelligence Landscape: A Venture Capital Perspective by David Beyer. The future of global, trustless transactions on the largest graph: blockchain by Olaf Carlson-Wee. Algorithms for Anti-Money Laundering by Richard Minerich.

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Process & Practices

In-App Subscriptions Made Easy

There are various types of subscriptions: recurring, non-recurring, free-trial periods, various billing cycles and any possible billing variation one can imagine. But with lack of information online, you might discover that mobile subscriptions behave differently from what you expected. This article will make your life somewhat easier when addressing an in-app subscriptions implementation.

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Operations & Infrastructure

Mini-talks: The Machine Intelligence Landscape: A Venture Capital Perspective by David Beyer. The future of global, trustless transactions on the largest graph: blockchain by Olaf Carlson-Wee. Algorithms for Anti-Money Laundering by Richard Minerich.

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Enterprise Architecture

Mini-talks: The Machine Intelligence Landscape: A Venture Capital Perspective by David Beyer. The future of global, trustless transactions on the largest graph: blockchain by Olaf Carlson-Wee. Algorithms for Anti-Money Laundering by Richard Minerich.

Automate All Things! Support for DevOps Tool Puppet Added to Windows Azure

Want to do DevOps automation in a Microsoft world? Typically that meant using Microsoft-provided tools like PowerShell and System Center instead of the popular open source tools that have been slow to support the full Microsoft product stack. That’s beginning to change as developers and system administrators can now use tools like Puppet to provision and manage resources in Windows Azure.

MS Open Tech engineers have undertaken this work through our focus on enhancing interoperability across popular DevOps tools. DevOps focuses on the management of the intersection between software development and IT operations. It emphasizes collaboration and integration between the increasingly agile software development team (where rapid change is necessary), and the operations team who are required to provide maximum up time (where change may impact reliability). DevOps seeks to enable these two groups to communicate and collaborate more effectively. The contribution of a Puppet Module for Windows Azure is an important step in ensuring that users of Puppet are able to leverage their skills in a Windows Azure environment.

To be sure, Puppet has supported Windows since the 2.7.6 release in 2011. The Puppet Master – which stores the model-driven manifests that express a system’s state – must run on a Linux server, but the servers and workstations that host the Puppet agent can be running either Linux or Windows. In Puppet’s Master/Agent mode, agents pull manifests from the Puppet Master and apply them in order to enforce the desired machine state. Puppet is available via open source, and also sells a more full-featured Enterprise version. Both versions support cloud VM provisioning in AWS and Google Compute Engine, and it’s possible to run Enterprise Puppet itself in a variety of clouds, including Windows Azure.

Chef – Puppet’s chief competitor – has offered Windows Azure integration for over a year. However, its plugin for Windows Azure focuses solely on creating and managing cloud VMs. Nonetheless, Microsoft’s customers now have the opportunity to use two of the most widely used DevOps automation tools against Windows servers and the Windows Azure cloud. Other DevOps tools are starting to turn their attention to Redmond’s flagship operating system as well. Vagrant is a tool used by developers and system administrators to quickly spin up consistent development environments. While users could run Vagrant on Windows machines, the virtual guests themselves only run Linux OSes. In the release notes for Vagrant 1.4, there is a passing mention that Vagrant 1.5 may introduce Windows guests, thus letting Microsoft-oriented developers take advantage of this popular tool and growing ecosystem.